Beta 3 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework was released on Wednesday. Apart from a whole bunch of fixes and enhancements this is the first release that will install with the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 (without hacking the install file). Naturally as the ADO.NET Entity Framework is a pre-requisite for Astoria we had to get this one soon. The December CTP of Astoria is expected shortly.

In addition yesterday Microsoft announced that a whole host of providers for the ADO.NET Entity Framework will be released within 3 months of the ADO.NET Entity Framework’s release. The list includes Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, DB2, IDS, Informix, Sybase, Ingres, Progress and VistaDB. This will certainly increase the desirability of this technology.